When President Biden gives his State of the Union Address Thursday night, you can bet the press will be hanging on every word, looking for anything that will bolster the narrative that he is losing it, that age is catching up with him, the there is reason to question his ability to serve. Any word he stumbles over, any thing he mixes up will be seized on and amplified. You can be sure the Republican Party will have people looking for anything they can use against him — and the media will not be cutting him any slack. Quite the reverse.
Keep in mind that President Biden knows this; he will be under a great deal of stress because the stakes will be so high. He will be making every effort to deliver, to make a case for another term AND to ultimately save America from the dark vision of Trump and the G.O.P. Biden will be speaking to and for every American, and for those in the rest of the world who look to America.
(You can see the speech and react to it in real time with emojis — see the link here.)
Will anyone pay any attention to what President Biden has to say? The media focus is all about the horse race, style over substance, who provides better entertainment. They love Trump because above all else, he is a performer and con man who has spent decades selling snake oil, whether it’s condos, casinos, steaks, or — most of all — himself.
(That being said, there are signs that now that the press can drop the Trump-Haley horserace, they are starting to realize that the Biden — Trump rematch is on and has stakes too high to trivialize. But don’t hold your breath. They want a spectacle, something entertaining.)
That’s why it’s a good necessary reason to watch Trump, to see and hear how he performs and what he thinks is important to say. After Super Tuesday, he gave a speech that was the equivalent of a State of the Union Address. As a former president running for another term — something we haven’t seen in decades — he was doing the traditional SOTU messaging: bragging about what his administration had done, how the current administration was falling short, and making promises about what he would do if given another term. All in classic Trump style of course. Over the top exaggeration, bullshit lies and petty insults, and skipping over some big items in his baggage.
It’s tempting to just look for signs of deterioration, but pay attention to what he says. Trump is speaking only to his loyalists here — if you’e not for him you can go to Hell and he’ll send you there if he thinks you’ve crossed him in any way. He doesn’t have any obvious memory lapses and his speech is relatively clear for the most part, but the content is jarring.
As far as the regular press coverage of this speech has gone, I’ve only seen the press reporting snippets. If the press highlighted the counter-factual world he has created for himself and the cult of personality the Republican Party has become, the polls would not even be close. It’s too easy to focus on moments of confusion, slurred speech and other issues while ignoring the bigger picture. Take what he has to say literally and figuratively. He means this sh*t.
Consider this Trump’s State of the Union Address.
I’ve got two ways for you to dive in and appreciate what’s going on here if you dare. I have done my best to transcribe his speech — you can find it below the video. If you can’t stand the sound of his voice or his alternating between smirking and grimacing, try the transcription. You can’t really appreciate just how different the bubble he’s created is from the reality hopefully enough of us still inhabit. If you don’t take time to look at it, you’ll be blindsided by just how extreme it is.
Here’s the video — skip to 14 and a half minutes in. That’s when he enters, and he stops to bask in the adulation of the crowd. He does his little dance moves and mugs for the crowd. Watch what happens after he takes the podium at 17 minutes and launches into his performance.
This transcription of Trump’s speech was transcribed by me from the video above. It’s around 3,000 of “all the best words”. I’ve had to guess at formatting sentences and paragraph breaks. Any transcription errors are hopefully minor. It’s classic Trump-speak: he uses lots of exaggeration, throws in casual insults, lots of disinformation, makes bizarre claims, and spews outright lies. I’ve inserted some notes of crowd reactions, but you need to watch the video to also get the tone of his remarks and the responses he gets.
If you are a real glutton for punishment, you can start the video at 17 minutes, and read through this while you hear it the way Trump says it.
Transcription of Donald J. Trump’s speech to supporters after Super Tuesday results, March 5, 2024
(Chants of USA USA USA…, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA”, Flags galore for a backdrop.)
Well thank you very much. They call it Super Tuesday for a reason. This is a big one, and they tell me the pundits and otherwise say that there has never been one like this, has never been anything so conclusive. This was an amazing, amazing night and amazing day. It’s been an incredible period of time and our country’s history. It’s been sad in so many ways but I think it’s going to be inspiring because we’re gonna do something that frankly nobody’s been able to do for a long time we’ve, (Cheering)
..we‘ve watched our country take a great beating over the last three years and nobody thought a thing like this would be possible. We wouldn’t have Russia attacking Ukraine. We wouldn’t have Israel being attacked. Iran as you know was broke when I was running things - they were broke they didn’t have money for Hamas, they didn’t have money for Hezbollah.
We had no inflation. Inflation is destroying the middle-class. It’s destroying everything. Inflation. If you look back over the history hundreds of years back it’s called inflation, is called the country Buster and that’s what it’s doing to our country. What’s happened with inflation has been unbelievable. A lot of people say, a lot of experts have said the stock market is the only thing that’s doing well and that’s doing well because our poll numbers are so much higher than Joe Biden’s.(Crowd cheers)
He’s the worst president in the history of our country. There’s never been anything like what’s happening to our country. Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown. Migrants were flown in airplanes, not going through borders, not going through the great Texas barrier that I was with the governor of Texas Greg Abbott the other day and we were looking at the job they’re doing, but in the meantime they’re pouring into California they’re pouring into Arizona. Because those governors aren’t doing anything they’re doing nothing.
But today it was just announced before I came out. It was unbelievable. I said that must be a mistake. They flew 325,000 migrants, flew ‘em in over the borders and into our country (Boos) so that really tells you where they’re coming from. They want open borders and open boarders are going to destroy our country. We need borders and we need free and fair elections and we don’t have a country.
This is an incredible group of people - so many celebrities that I’m not gonna introduce any because I’m just gonna get myself in trouble if I do that cause I’ll leave out most of you. But we have this is a room chock full of incredible talented people like some of the guys standing right in front of me right - big big futures, big fat, beautiful futures. (Laughter) Ohhhh I’d love to be your age. I’d pay you a lot of money to be your age. But we have, we have some tremendously talented people in this room, including tremendously, talented, political people that helped me right from the beginning
We had the safest border in the history of our country. We built 571 miles of wall. We had Mexico supply us with 28,000 soldiers because we, we wanted them. That’s why and they said that we won’t do that. I said yes you will, you will and at the end they did. It was an easy negotiation but we had the safest border, the best numbers we’ve ever had and now we have the worst numbers probably. Probably in the history of the world.
It’s sad to see what’s happening to our cities. Our cities are being overrun with migrant crime, and that’s Biden migrant crime. But it’s a new category of crime. And it’s violent where they’ll stand in the middle of a street and have fist fights with police officers and if they did that in their countries from where they came, they be killed instantly, instantly. They wouldn’t do that.
So the world is laughing at us. The world is taking advantage of us.
Three years ago we were in a level where we were energy independent; we were gonna be very shortly energy dominant. And today we’re getting oil from Venezuela. Can you believe it? And we’re doing numbers on that oil. You know what we’re doing? We’re refining the oil - we have our refinery for that oil. Well really I call it tar. It’s not oil, it’s terrible - but we have real stuff. But we’re refining it in Houston. So for all of the environmentalists you ought to look at that because all of that tar is going right up into the atmosphere. You just ought to to take a look. It’s the only plant that can do it. We have the only plants that can take tar and make it into oil and that’s what it is. It’s a shame.
But we were energy independent, we were gonna be dominant, we were gonna be supplying oil to Europe, all over the world, and then a tragic thing happened during the election. It was a tragedy because you wouldn’t have - think of it - all of the problems that you have today. I don’t think you would’ve had any of them. You’d only have success and that’s what’s ultimately going to unify this country and unify this party. We have a great Republican party with tremendous talent and we want to have unity and we’re going to have unity and it’s gonna happen very quickly. And I have been saying lately success will bring unity to our country and it happened before. We had the best economy our country’s ever had and people were calling me that I would’ve said will never happen. It’ll never happen.
They wanted to get together African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, women, men. People with diplomas from the best schools in the world and people that didn’t graduate from high school. Every single group was doing better than ever before, and it was a beautiful thing. Our country was coming together. (Cheering) Our country was coming together, and now we have a very divided country. We have a country that a political person uses weaponization against his political opponent. Never happened here. It happens in another countries, but they’re Third World countries and some ways, we’re a Third World country.
We’re a Third World country at our borders, and we’re a Third World country at our elections and we have to stop that. We need a fair and free press. The press has not been fair nor has it been free but maybe someday they will be. They’re being beaten up pretty badly. People aren’t trusting them. They’re not believing them, and really, it’s a very important fact of the press to be the policeman. It used to police our country. Now nobody has confidence in them and we have to get that confidence back. It’s so important for the success of our country. So important. (Applause)
So this has been a day that we, we’ve been waiting for. I want to thank my family for being here, it’s a great family, I have a great family. They’ve had it very easy since I decided to run for politics. They say thanks a lot dad - we appreciate it. But they’re strong and they’re very capable people. They love the country. They really do love the country and we appreciate it and I want to thank everybody at my staff, Susie, Chris, credible job, credible job you’re doing. (applause)
I read an article yesterday where it said this is one of the finest run campaigns that anybody has ever seen - that’s pretty good right? That’s pretty good, really a statement. And we have no choice because November 5 right around the corner. November 5 is going to go down as the single most important day in the history of our country. (Applause USA USA USA)
We’re going to take it and we’re going to make it like it should be - respected. Right now we’re not respected. Right now our country is known as a joke. It’s a joke. Other leaders who I speak to, other leaders can’t believe what happened to us because three years ago we were the most respected country anywhere in the world by far. We were doing things that nobody could believe. China was paying us billions and billions of dollars.
In 25 years they paid us nothing, zero, not ten cents. I was getting billions of dollars and they were happy about it, as happy as you can be. Of course maybe there’s reasons for things that have happened, but they were not, they were not so happy with certain things I guess based on things that took place. But they were, we were getting along with everybody. We were getting along and we were respected by everybody. We had no wars. Remember when I had the debate with Hillary Clinton, she said “Look look at him - look at that personality. He’s going to cause wars, wars.” I said no my personality’s going to keep us out of wars and that’s what happened. (Cheering)
For 20 years they were fighting Isis. I defeated Isis in four weeks. I got rid of Isis 100%, 100% of the Isis caliphate, and we had no wars and we stopped wars. We weren’t getting along with a lot of countries. All of a sudden North Korea, which is a serious nuclear power, but North Korea came along Kim Jong-un. We got along very well. We got along very well with China until Covid. That was a little bit too much so as far I was concerned, that was too much - couldn’t take that one but we made a trade deal with China that I don’t even talk about. $50 billion a year in product they bought from our farmers, our manufacturers, they used to buy 10 and I got 50 and it was great, but Covid...
I don’t even talk about that because Covid was such a horrible thing. It started in the Wuhan labs just as I said. The Wuhan labs, and it came out I believe through incompetence. I believe it was incompetence. Some people think it wasn’t but I believe it was but regardless it was $60 trillion worth of damage and death all over the world, all over the world. And we did a fantastic job on that. We never got credit for that, unbelievable job on that. We came up with things that nobody thought was possible.
Don’t forget when it came in, nobody had an idea what it was. They didn’t even use the word pandemic nobody had an idea. But we did a fantastic job and we got a lot of credit for the economy, a lot of credit for our foreign policy. I think credit like nobody - very few people have gotten - the press was very honest about it. They give us very high marks foreign policy, the Abraham accord so many different things we did. But we we never got that kind of due that we should have for the Covid or as I call it affectionately the Chinese virus, the China virus, which is a much more accurate term. (Applause)
And despite that the stock market, when we turned it over, the stock market was higher than it was prior to Covid coming and it was an amazing thing that we did an amazing job and we have so many people that worked on that. So many of the doctors so many of the scientists that worked with us on that and it was really really something, but there’s never been an administration that had more success in so many different elements.
We got the largest tax cut in history, we have the largest regulation cuts in history, we rebuilt our military and what happened? We rebuilt our entire military -beautiful - and we had jets jet fighters that were 53 years old and we had all brand new jet fighters and then after this other group of people that didn’t know what they were doing, they took over and we had that horrible Surrender in Afghanistan.
I call it a surrender. We took the soldiers out first. You know I dealt with the leaders of the Taliban in Afghanistan. They were the ones that were causing the trouble. The press was very angry because they said why are you calling them? I said because that’s where the problem is. I say often times I say they asked Jesse James, Jesse why do you rob Banks? He said because that’s where the money is And I said that’s where the problem is with the Taliban and I spoke to Abdul. He’s still the leader, believe it or not he’s really the leader of Afghanistan, but he’s the leader of the Taliban, a rough group. I say, don’t ever shoot our soldiers again don’t ever do it.
Very interesting what happened is that we were having during the Obama administration previously, they were shooting a lot of our soldiers and I let them know. I said don’t ever, ever let that happen. I said, in a very rather nasty fashion - won’t have to go into it tonight - for 18 months we lost nobody in Afghanistan and then we had that horrible, horrible withdrawal, where we lost 13 soldiers, 38 horribly wounded. Left Americans behind. (Applause)
You know we have Americans right now still behind, call them hostages if you like. It was a terrible moment. We left $85 billion worth of brand new beautiful equipment behind, jets and tanks and everything you couldn’t think of - goggles, night goggles. They didn’t used to fight they’re good fighters. They didn’t used to fight at night but now they do because they have goggles. They have better goggles than we have. So I just want to tell you that led to a lot of bad things.
And now the worst things are happening. The things that are happening now are unthinkable and they’re unthinkable at the border. We have millions of people invading our country. This is an invasion. This is the worst invasion. Probably - we’ve never had anything like it. No country has ever had anything like it. The number today could be 15 million people.
And they’re coming from rough places and dangerous places and we had that shut down. We had everything going so beautifully. When Joe Biden goes to the beach - because somebody on his staff thinks he looks very good in a bathing suit (laughter) until he can’t get his feet out of the sand or lift the chair which was about 9 ounces - Joe Biden, if he would’ve just left everything alone, he could’ve gone to the beach, he would’ve had a tremendous success at the border and elsewhere.
So we’re gonna take back our country. We’re gonna make sure, (Cheering) we are, we are going to do it right. We’re going to have the greatest economy ever in the history of our country. We’re gonna top what we did. We’re gonna become an energy center of the world. We were ready to become energy dominant and they stopped that, they stopped that, but we’re gonna become energy dominant .
We’re gonna pay off debt. We’re gonna do things that nobody thought it was possible. But you know we hadn’t done our second phase of the tax cut where we did the tax cut, the Democrats fought us very hard. And now they say well I guess that was pretty good because we took much more revenues after we cut taxes and then we did all of those regulation cuts and people were working and everybody was happy and we were all proud of our country.
But we’re gonna win this election because we have no choice. if we lose the election we’re not gonna have a country left. (Cheers, applause)
And we’re gonna do something - thank you very much. We love you too, and we love our country and we can’t let this magnificent - some people call it an experiment. I don’t call it an experiment I just say this is a magnificent place, a magnificent country, and it’s so sad to see how far it’s come and gone. When you look at, when you look at the depths of where it’s gone, we can’t let that happen.
We’re gonna straighten it out. We’re gonna close our borders, we’re gonna drill baby drill, we’re gonna get the inflation down, (Cheers) and we are going to make our country greater than ever before, and we’re gonna do it quickly. We’re gonna do it quickly. it’s gonna go fast.
We have to get the criminals out. We have many many criminals that have entered our country. We have people coming in from such Such bad places and we’re gonna have to get them out. We have murderers that are being deposited into our country. We have drug dealers at the biggest and highest levels that are coming into our country.
We have people coming into our country that just shouldn’t be here but many and I say many large percentages they come through the caravans they come in many different ways. Now we find out again. They come in through airplanes we send them in. This is crazy, but they come into our country. We’re gonna stop them and we’re gonna close our borders. We’re gonna have to deport a lot of people a lot of bad people. Because our country can’t live like this - our cities, our cities are choking to death. Our states are dying and frankly our country is dying and we’re gonna make America great again, greater than ever before.
Thank you very very much. Been a big night. Thank you very much. Thank you.
(Cheers and applause, exit music Sam & Dave “Hold On, I’m Coming.)
If you made it all the way through this, congratulations. There are statements in there that only make sense to Trump and his worshippers — where does he get 325,000 migrants on airplanes? It’s apparently this right-wing conspiracy claim. Other statements are random facts or code-speak. There are plenty of dog whistles in the speech.
When he talks about jet fighters being 53 years old, my best guess is that he’s talking about B-52 bombers — which the Air Force plans to keep flying for years to come, and is modernizing them with new engines and other systems. When he talks about the press being a policeman, my guess there is that he’s referencing the Republican claims that the press is censoring them, and is losing its audience because people know they are lying to them. When he talks about Afghanistan, China, Covid...
Trump has challenged President Biden to a debate, but I can’t see how there would be any way for it to be useful. Trump and the Republican Party live in an entirely fabricated universe. There is no way to debate him on facts because there is no shared objective reality between them, and we know no one in the media is capable of keeping him under control. Besides — Trump doesn’t debate on facts or logic. It’s all about putting on a performance and dominating his targets. This wouldn’t be Lincoln — Douglas. It wouldn’t even be Abbott — Costello.
You can see why the press has trouble covering his remarks, or the rest of the zone-flooding the right wing is doing these days. Fact-checking is nearly impossible when dealing with people who live in a world of alternative facts. The only thing that matters to them is whatever Trump decrees is so. That’s why Trump’s de facto SOTU speech is important to watch — because that’s the world Trump plans on making the rest of us live in if he gets another term in the White House.
One More Thing:
The New York Times has an article that lays out exactly how long the United States would have to respond to an incoming nuclear attack — FIFTEEN MINUTES — and the one person who would have Sole Authority to give the orders.
...In the United States, it’s up to one person to decide whether the world becomes engulfed in nuclear war. Only the president has the authority to launch any of the roughly 3,700 nuclear weapons in the American stockpile, an arsenal capable of destroying all human life many times over. And that authority is absolute: No other person in the U.S. government serves as a check or balance once he or she decides to go nuclear. There is no requirement to consult Congress, to run the idea by the defense secretary or to ask the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his or her opinion.
That means the American president is charged with the physical safety not only of some 334 million Americans but also of millions of people in other countries who, out of necessity, must rely upon his or her prudence and steady nerves to make a decision that could alter the course of human history.
Contemplate that excerpt from the article, and ask yourself what sane person would give that power to a man like Donald J. Trump?